#DropOutHillary

Submission 38,608

Part of a series on Hillary Clinton. [View Related Entries]

About

#DropOutHillary is a social media hashtag urging the 2016 Democratic presidential primary candidate Hillary Clinton to suspend her campaign and concede the nomination to rival Bernie Sanders.

Origin

Throughout the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, various critics of the front-runner candidate Hillary Clinton used the hashtag #DropOutHillary in tweets calling for her to abandon her presidential campaign. On May 4th, 2016, the hashtag began trending on Twitter^[5] and Facebook^[6] immediately after the Republican presidential primary Ted Cruz and John Kasich had suspended their campaigns, with many supporters of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders calling for Clinton to do the same (shown below).

Spread

That day, the news site Blue Nation Review^[2] published an article titled "Despicable #DropOutHillary Hashtag: Only a Female Front Runner Would be Told to Drop Out," which accused the online campaign of being fueled by sexism. By the end of the day, The Inquisitr^[7] reported that nearly 100,000 tweets containing the hashtag had been posted on the microblogging site. The article subsequently reached the front page of the /r/politics^[3] subreddit, where it gained upwards of 11,900 votes (65% upvoted) and 3,600 comments within 24 hours. By May 5th, the hashtag had been tweeted over 475,000 times.^[4] In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the trending hashtag, including Vox,^[8] RT,^[9] TheGatewayPundit^[10] and Salon.^[11]